The purpose of this blog will be to introduce a variety of topics relating to genealogical research topics and Southeast Michigan. Topics will be updated on a regular basis and input is always welcome.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Using YouTube to do your Genealogy

In researching my family for over thirty years I have learned that you never learn all you can in researching your family. Often times the key to resolving a problem in your genealogy is learn from others that have experienced the same problem. With the creation of the Internet you can gain free access to thousands of web presentations on a variety of subjects related to genealogy. One of the best out there is the website YouTube.

The website is very easy to get to because its name is the link to the website. www.youtube.com Once you get to the website you need to decide what you are going to look for or learn about. Your first search could be the word Genealogy. When I did my search there are over 106,000 videos. In our situation let’s narrow it down a little smaller by subject. Now let’s try Genealogy Ohio. This brings us down to 1,930 videos. All having some mention of the state of Ohio and doing genealogy.

Unfortunately when you go to Genealogy Ohio Lucas you start to get things that do not relate to genealogy at all, but to the county Lucas. From what I can see there is no way to get the correct results when doing this search.

When you select a video you want to use just click on the box. My suggestion is watching it on the site rather than download it. Depending on the speed of your internet connect it could take a while to download. Now when you click on the video it takes you to the actual page where the video is located. Take some time to familiarize yourself with the page. Where the video is there is a small arrow that is pointing to the left. You can start the video here but you can stop and start it by clicking on the video itself. There is a speaker icon to adjust the sound of the video. The next item is the running time of the video. It can vary from seconds to hours. Time is based on subject and video.

You can also save the video for later viewing. This can be done by clicking on the clock. The next icon of importance is the square that appears as an open box. You can enlarge the video by clicking on this icon and the video will go to full screen. This can be reduced by just clicking on the screen.

The last thing is the button that slides from left to right and shows the running time of the video. You can point pointer on what looks like a button and move it from left to right. At anytime you can change to point you are watching in the video. This is excellent when you have missed a point and need to do review.

The wonderful thing is you can watch almost any aspect of genealogy research. Some of the topics covered are Brick walls, naturalization, military and vital records. The videos are almost endless and it is constantly being updated.

Remember YouTube is free. Learning is important in genealogy. As always remember to have fun. The worst that could happen is you learn something new. We all know that is important.

Questions please contact me a daveyderek@gmail.com.

This is going to be published in a upcoming Newsletter for the Lucas County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society.